


Bitterness

by themadlurker



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Backstory, Community: where_no_woman, Divorce, Drabble, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-01
Updated: 2009-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28128285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themadlurker/pseuds/themadlurker
Summary: Before she took the whole damn planet, she earned it too.
Relationships: Jocelyn McCoy/Leonard "Bones" McCoy
Kudos: 1





	Bitterness

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: "ex-Mrs. McCoy, achievement" from the "Where No Woman Has Drabbled Before" challenge

She hears every word her husband doesn't say as he glares across the table at her. She's heard them all too many times since this started, and she's given up on repeating the words the same as he has. Her response to his glare is to straighten her spine a little more, and look fixedly at the courtroom door.

If you'd asked her six months ago whether she expected to end up in divorce court, she'd have said, emphatically, "no." Yes, they'd fought sometimes. ( _You'd learn to yell, too, if you were married to Lenny,_ she'd told one of her friends in jest.) But those were quick bouts of frustration, and they passed without rancour on either side. At least, she'd always thought they'd avoided resentment until the day she got a job offer from the Federation Council. She wouldn't go so far as to say that Leonard looked happier than the day Joanna was born, but it was a pretty near thing. She tried to explain to him (what she'd told him already a hundred times, what she'd thought he understood) that she didn't want to be a "projects manager," didn't want a desk in an office building or to manage thousands of personnel she'd never met. Only when somewhere along the way he got this look of fury on his face that she'd never seen before ( _never noticed?_ ), as he told her that if she thought he was waiting another damn year for her to get sick of this hellhole...

She felt like she was standing somewhere outside her body, watching a conversation play out that looked intimately familiar, but strange and meaningless as well ( _the madman howling into the wind and expecting it to listen_ ). All his complaints - and Leonard wasn't a man to stint on complaining - about the climate, the people, the landscape: weren't those just his grumbling way of showing affection? Where had the bitterness come from? Surely he couldn't - but he did; wanted to take Joanna out of school, pack up their home and head for Earth, leave the colony and the business she'd built and the people who'd worked for her through three famines when the Federation had put them on the "low-priority" list for relief. It was the first time she'd ended a fight with him feeling that she couldn't breathe, and even now there's a sense of something tightened around her chest.

The judge comes in at last, and pronounces after a minimum of formalities. Even this, this meeting before the court is a matter of formality. She's made Beta Arturi the first mining colony in the sector where it's safe to raise a family and where people know they have the security to stay on until the demand for ore rises again. Her company owns half the damn planet, and every single member of the judge's family works for her, too. He can tell her it isn't fair - he's probably reached that point in his silent litany again - but he already knows her answer (he's heard it; she knows his response): this place is her achievement, and he can just try to wrest a handful of the rock he disdained from her cold, dead hand.


End file.
